Finally read @Uptodatenow 's excellent overview of the strawmap! The strawmap is indeed mostly a supply-side endeavour. But I want to stress 2 of its 5 objectives that in my view have the potential to increase demand by improving service quality or offering net new features: 1. Fast L1 objectives (shorter slots, faster finality) directly improve UX, capital efficiency and onchain markets. See eg @benjaminion_xyz 's latest or @jonah_b 's post from last year 2. Privacy at L1 also addresses what appears to be a strong user demand. Good to see steps in that direction with eg keyed nonces and other proposals like EIP-8182

1/ Researchers, protocol teams, founders, students, local organizers, and globally distributed teams have all made Lisbon part of their home base. Today, we’re excited to announce that Lisbon is joining the Ethereum Community Hub network hosted at the @gnosis_ office

Upgrading Finality - Edition 1 Check out the plan for bringing fast finality to Ethereum. Hosted on the the brand new and shiny EF Protocol Consensus website 😁 Lots of good stuff there!

0/ Clear signing is now live. An open standard to end blind signing, making human-readable transactions default. This effort brings a major UX and Security upgrade to transaction signing on Ethereum.

There's a new chapter starting for the Protocol cluster. We're welcoming new leads and coordinators, and continuing our work toward Glamsterdam, Hegotà, and the Strawmap. More in the blog below 👇

Privacy should be the universal default, not a cypherpunk flag. Every on-chain read and write leaks metadata to multiple observers: ISP, DNS, RPC, indexer, bundler, chain. Hermetic is a modular playground for access-layer privacy. Still very alpha. A self-contained local binary that stacks privacy-preserving layers and exposes sound solutions, with stated tradeoffs, over simple APIs. Today: - Railgun shielding, unshielding, queries. - Every egress request over an isolated Tor circuit, including DNS (next: DoH). - Rust host + embedded Tor via Arti, no separate sidecar. How: - SDK code runs sandboxed in @deno_land, stripped of most permissions. - No fetch, no node:net, no host writes. Modules are cut off from the world. Untrusted. - Every SDK network call crosses the Deno boundary, Hermetic intercepts and routes via Tor. No escape possible. Doesn't yet defend against broadcaster trust, query-pattern inference, timing leaks, or mempool exposure. Exploring: - Aztec and other on-chain privacy backends. - Wasm modules, light clients, messaging. - Account isolation. - Local, agent-friendly APIs. Would appreciate help. DM if interested!

10M of stake, just ~12500 validators. If the whole stake was like this, we could finalize in seconds. Let your staking pool know that you want the finality time to go down by 100x, and let's get the remaining 900k validators down to a few thousands 🫡

🔐 New EIP-8250: Keyed Nonces for Frame Transactions 🔐 by @soispoke, @nero_eth, @lightclients and @VitalikButerin This replaces the single sender nonce with (nonce_key, nonce_seq), giving frame transactions independent replay domains. For privacy protocols, the key can be derived from a nullifier: concurrent withdrawals from a shared sender become possible, with inclusion atomically marking the nullifier spent. Target fork: Hegota Links below 👇

Keyed nonces are not just a way to add stronger in-protocol support for privacy solutions. They are also a potential first foray into a new state scaling strategy for Ethereum: create new types of storage that are more optimized for handling categories of use cases that we care about, with restrictions on their use that make them usable at extreme scale while preserving the protocol's decentralization. Let's zoom in on this case (in-protocol nullifiers). Let's say we get to 2000 TPS of privacy-preserving transactions onchain, for eight years. Then we get 2^11 tx/sec * 2^25 sec/year * 2^3 years = 2^39 [ie. 500 billion] nullifiers stored onchain (the challenge with nullifiers is that they are fundamentally not possible to prune). It's actually far easier to keep Ethereum decentralized if we have 500 billion nullifiers onchain in a dedicated nullifier store, than if we just let them grow in the current state. The reason is that the more restrictive structure of nullifiers (only used to check validity, and we can require the nullifier ID to be explicitly specified in the tx) enables more decentralized ways of handling them. This includes: * Sharding: each node (incl builders) can hold a small percentage of nullifiers, and make sure to have a connection to an honest peer in each other shard * Bloom filters: see this somewhat wacky idea here for reducing the VOPS requirement for nullifiers to ~8 bits per nullifier: Both techniques are not possible to use for dynamically accessible state. And so builders would have to download the full 16 TB to become viable (not just optimal, viable!), and privacy protocol users would not be able to use FOCIL without providing a Merkle branch proving that their nullifier is unspent, and there would be very few nodes capable of providing such a branch... Zooming back out, the moral of the story is that fully dynamic state is much harder to handle at extreme scale (tens to hundreds of TB) than state that is more controlled and restricted in how it can be used. And so if we can move the majority of usage into these more specialized forms of state (which we can make much cheaper in terms of gas), then we can keep Ethereum decentralized, and highly scalable, and keep the fully dynamic state available for applications (eg. defi) that really need its full functionality.

🔐 New EIP-8250: Keyed Nonces for Frame Transactions 🔐 by @soispoke, @nero_eth, @lightclients and @VitalikButerin This replaces the single sender nonce with (nonce_key, nonce_seq), giving frame transactions independent replay domains. For privacy protocols, the key can be derived from a nullifier: concurrent withdrawals from a shared sender become possible, with inclusion atomically marking the nullifier spent. Target fork: Hegota Links below 👇

Interop this year was outstanding. Extremely exciting to see Ethereum scaling, expect at least 2x-3x after Glamsterdam. Core devs were very, very busy and yet they also managed to make progress on FOCIL for Hegota. Ethereum goes hard.

Last week, Ethereum core contributors gathered in Svalbard for the Soldøgn interop: a week long event focused on hardening Glamsterdam implementations to scale Ethereum securely ☀️ Read the full recap, including their candidate post-fork gas limit, below:

Ethereum's staking ratio just passed 1/3 for the first time. Under the current issuance curve, it won't stop until nearly all ETH is staked and solo stakers are forced out. The window to fix this is closing - article "Ethereum’s Staking Ratio: The Tipping Point" linked below.

Alice swaps privately on L1 tldr: Privacy protocol users today depend on broadcasters that can see, frontrun, and censor their transactions. In this thread we show how four future protocol upgrades can remove this dependency step by step. Native AA (EIP-8141) and 2D nonces let users self-submit with no off-chain infrastructure. Encrypted frame transactions hide swap parameters until after block ordering is committed. FOCIL guarantees inclusion as long as one honest includer can see the transaction pending in the public mempool. 👇🧵